Unexpected Different Attitudes In Older Works

[Clark_K]

@RealityChuck

Robert Silverberg wrote a story in the 50s, “Eve and the 23 Adams,” where every spaceship had a “crew girl” – basically, a ship’s prostitute – because if men went without sex they grew tense and make mistakes.

Bad enough, but in the story, the girl isn’t a hooker, but rather the fiancee of the son of the narrator, who signed on without knowing what the job actually was. She refuses (after takeoff, of course), so they end up drugging her and raping her in her sleep so she doesn’t know what happens. She meets up with her fiance thinking that nothing has happened, though the narrator, at least shows some remorse by drinking himself in a stupor the entire flight.

This was during Silverberg’s hack phase, before he became a major writer. I notice it hasn’t been reprinted in the US since 1969, so I would think he had second thoughts.

I was stunned by this and did a little googling. I found the text for a “Science Fiction Monthly” from 1976. It mentions this story but describes it as the girl tricking the ship’s captain by signing on for the voyage without any intention of doing the required job. The captain then “beguiles her into fulfilling her function unawares,” according to the article.

So in 1976, a semi-scholarly SF review considered sexual assault of an unconscious woman to be a simple matter of beguiling her.

[Alessan]

My theory is that many writers of the 1950’s through 1970’s, particularly those who considered them selves part of the counterculture, considered rape to be just another sexual taboo. If you believed that the old norms were wrong, and that things like sex outside of marriage or sex for fun were cool, then why not underage sex, or non-consensual sex? Why listen to what society says? Why be a prude?

[F.U.Shakespeare]

@puzzlegal

Mad Men played with this idea, by having the characters do things that would have been normal at the time. For instance, the family goes on a picnic and then throws all the trash in the bushes (in a public park.) Or the children run into the living room playing “astronaut” with their mother’s dry cleaning bags over their heads. She flips – because they are messing with her dry cleaning. She isn’t at all concerned with them having cling-film bags on their heads. Or the time a minor character’s foot is damaged by a lawn mower. “Poor guy, he can’t work in an advertising agency any more. Oh well.”

To be fair, that was Roger Sterling’s reaction, which I thought was intended as another example of his obnoxiously callous personality. (Draper referred to the accident as “a terrible tragedy”). The exchange was actually pretty funny: in response to “He’s going to lose the foot”, Sterling replied with mock regret, “Just after he got it in the door!”

[Balthisar]

@alphaboi867

I had the exact same experience in the mid 90s when I was 10 years old and flew to Hawai’i by myself to meet my older brother and his new wife. I even had a layover at LAX that I spend in an airline daycare type room with other unaccompanied minors.

My younger brother and I had a similar experience, flying from DTW from mom to Reno with dad. I remember the date exactly: August 3, 1981, because it was a big event, and caused our continuing flight from DFW to be cancelled. American treated us awesomely, though, and we got to ride from DFW to to Love Field to catch a Braniff flight they’d arranged for us. Apparently the ATC at Love Field hadn’t walked out.

[thorny_locust]

@sitchensis

Robert B. Parker basically wrote the same Spenser book 40 times over a 40 year period. Taken as a whole it’s like one bizarre work of art with the characters and stories basically staying the same and a fun house mirror version of current events changing around them.

Out of sheer curiosity: may I ask whether Spenser’s girlfriend ever either starved to death or at least wound up in a hospital with an anorexia diagnosis? She ate less with every book; but although Parker kept making a point of how little she was eating, it never seemed to be presented as a problem. I stopped reading them after a while, I couldn’t stand it.

[Jonathan_Chance]

@furryman

In the TV movie adaptation of *The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything * there’s a scene where they get even with the female villain by throwing her naked into a van full of sailors. The next scene shows her walking onto a ship wearing a sailor’s uniform. I doubt they’d do that now.

Happens in the book, too. Her personality is completely transformed and she talks exclusively about the Navy after that incident. From a modern perspective, she’s completely traumatized by what is, in effect, a mass rape and is thereby transformed from an ambitious, motivated go-getter (if evil) to a sexual toy. Ouch.

[Jonathan_Chance]

Hmm. I don’t remember it well, but I recall one Travis Magee novel - where I trainwrecked on the series - where Travis’ investigation leads him to a local trailer court where lesbians lived. His response to their talking back - and acting pretty stereotypically butch and dumb - is to just sort of beat some sense into them with a golf club. It’s not just that, though. It was his attitude while doing it. Had he been dealing with a male character he’d have taken it seriously and beat the dude down. When coming at these women his attitude was more of ‘this is something to not take seriously and let’s just drive them off like some stray dogs or something’.

[sitchensis]

@thorny_locust

Out of sheer curiosity: may I ask whether Spenser’s girlfriend ever either starved to death or at least wound up in a hospital with an anorexia diagnosis? She ate less with every book; but although Parker kept making a point of how little she was eating, it never seemed to be presented as a problem. I stopped reading them after a while, I couldn’t stand it.

It’s been a long time but if I remember correctly, sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s she left Spenser for a while and then he saved her. She became a successful psychologist in Cambridge and other than the over the top cutesy stuff became more of a “realistic” female character. She was always a little waspy and vain and I think Parker used her food eccentricities to highlight her delicateness vs the Spencer character, but you’re right that a person can’t survive by nibbling the lettuce off a club sandwich.

[WildaBeast]

This actually isn’t a book I read so it’s kind of hearsay I guess, but I remember a friend once mentioning reading an older book in which a female character who’s about to turn 30 is worried about approaching “middle age”, the implication being that age 30 was the start of being middle aged.

[RealityChuck]

@WildaBeast

This actually isn’t a book I read so it’s kind of hearsay I guess, but I remember a friend once mentioning reading an older book in which a female character who’s about to turn 30 is worried about approaching “middle age”, the implication being that age 30 was the start of being middle aged.

There was a long-running radio soap opera, The Romance of Helen Trent that used the same premise. The opening:

@The Romance of Helen Trent

And now, The Romance of Helen Trent, the real-life drama of Helen Trent, who, when life mocks her, breaks her hopes, dashes her against the rocks of despair, fights back bravely, successfully, to prove what so many women long to prove, that because a woman is 35 or more, romance in life need not be over, that romance can begin at 35.

[aruvqan]

@Chronos

If we’re getting into racism and sexism, we could be here all day. Which is presumably why the OP specifically excluded them.

But on pedophila, there’s quite an uncomfortable streak of it running through 1970s science fiction.

All sorts of alternate sex stuff, there was an author that a friend of our roomies ‘dated’ a couple times who figured if someone didn’t end up bruised and bleeding it wasn’t a good date, she wrote a bunch of books about women in various forms of sexual slavery like Crystals of Mida or the Terrilian series … complete with livingly described bondage rape scenes with no safe word

@CairoCarol

Not so much attitudinal as technological, though the two are ultimately entwined: before the advent of cell phones, the heroines of mystery/suspense novels would often, with formulaic predictability, find themselves trapped by the bad guy, who would attempt to murder them in a remote spot. Only the pluck of the heroine would save the day.

I recall reading that as cell phones became ubiquitous, there was actually a workshop at a mystery writers’ conference regarding “how to write a realistic climax in the cell phone era.” Because nowadays, if one is striving for realiism, all the plucky heroine has to do is whip out her cell phone and call for help.

Common solutions to this writers’ problem include lost phones, stolen phones, phones hurled into lakes or stomped on by the evil guy, lack of reception in a remote area, and so on. All of which are potentially plausible circumstances, but this is something mystery novel writers never used to have to worry about.

Wouldn’t work for a friend of mine, she has a satellite phone. She does a lot of driving through pretty empty areas, and decided the thousand bucks or so a year for something she might only use to call AAA once a year is worth it. She also packs a gun, so I wouldn’t try ambushing her. But then again, I carry concealed when I road tri as well, mrAru said he would rather bail me out of jail than ID me in a morgue.

@RealityChuck

I’ve been watching a few of the old Our Gang comedies and was struck by the fact that the kids – who were well under ten years old – were allowed to play unsupervised. The youngest ones did hang out with their older siblings, but you had six-year-olds who spent the day getting into trouble without an adult around until one showed up to deal with the mess they made.

That was the way it was in the 50s and early 60s: kids just hung out together without adults. But nowadays, you can’t leave a child that young without supervision, and it could be construed as child neglect.

Did that into the 70s, born in 1961 and my brother [bprn in 59] and I roamed around with gangs of friends and cousins, we sort of free ranged lunch, Mom would boot us out after breakfast and we had to be home when the YMCA camp blew chow call and we would get bathroom breaks and lunch wherever we ended up closest to.

@WildaBeast

The twist was that she turned out to have some sort of weapon hidden in her elaborate hairdo, so even though she was naked she could pull out a weapon and attack them.

I had a Japanese hair stick, an antique that I bought at an auction back in the early 1970s that had a hidden blade in it that was about 2 inches long and perhaps a quarter inch wide, and about an eighth of an inch thick at the back spine. It was carven out of some sort of horn or bone and the whole thing was rather pretty.

@Melbourne

1. I have known women who appreciated cat calls.

2. I have known women who had rape fantasies (and I have read writing by others)

We had a couple as roomies back when mrAru was stationed in Norfolk VA, she had the fantasy of being gang raped by bikers. At one point I was almost pissed enough at her to call some old neighbors from when I lived on 13th Bay street to arrange it. I guarantee she would not have enjoyed reality.

@RealityChuck

Robert Silverberg wrote a story in the 50s, “Eve and the 23 Adams,” where every spaceship had a “crew girl” – basically, a ship’s prostitute – because if men went without sex they grew tense and make mistakes.

Duplicated sort of in one of Piers Anthony’s Dictator series, the one set on the spaceship, they ‘ships head’ was a woman that would have vag sex with the CO and XO, oral with the rest of the officers and give hand jobs to the enlisteds [or something like that, been seriously long since I bothered reading it, I was stuck in hospital and there wasn’t much choice in books.]

@Clark_K

I was stunned by this and did a little googling. I found the text for a “Science Fiction Monthly” from 1976. It mentions this story but describes it as the girl tricking the ship’s captain by signing on for the voyage without any intention of doing the required job. The captain then “beguiles her into fulfilling her function unawares,” according to the article.

So in 1976, a semi-scholarly SF review considered sexual assault of an unconscious woman to be a simple matter of beguiling her.

Also in one of the 70s SF/F magazines was set post apocalyptic US, pair of men capture a black woman and calmly discuss screwing her and the guy that was actually married to her was going to just get head because he didn’t want sloppy seconds [the guys were white] though it was a ploy to get the bad guy to drop gun with his trou so they could kill him without getting shot.

[Miller]

@Slow_Moving_Vehicle

When I was about six years old or so, my parents put me on a plane, by myself, to visit my grandmother in North Carolina. Mom handed me off to a stewardess - this is long enough ago that they were still called “stewardesses” - and she kept an eye on me during the flight. Brought me a set of wings, and took me up to the cockpit to meet the pilots. At the airport, an airline hostess met me at the gate and escorted me to my grandmother. This was in the early 70’s; I can’t imagine that happening today.

I can attest that it literally just happened today. Just got off s plane from SF to Boston, and I sat next to an unaccompanied nine year old kid the whole way.

[Treppenwitz]

Just remembered - The Man With The Golden Gun.

This quote actually isn’t quite as awful as I remembered it - Fleming may even have been sending the myth up - but it certainly is something from a different time:

Now it may only be a myth, and it is certainly not medical science, but there is a popular theory that a man who cannot whistle has homosexual tendencies… (M hadn’t whistled since he was a boy. Unconsciously his mouth pursed and a clear note was emitted.)

j

[Toxylon]

@gkster

I’m reading a 1954 book by Enid Blyton, one of the most prolific children’s authors of the mid 1900s.
Twins, seven years old, are being sent unaccompanied on a 5 hour train trip.

"“I’ll tell the guard to come and have a look at you now and then,” [mother] said. “You’ll be quite all right, because you don’t have to change anywhere. Eat your sandwiches when you see a clock on some station pointing to half-past twelve.”

Huh? I was a kid in the 80’s, and, starting at age seven, every summer I traveled by train, solo, to my Grandma’s farm, some 700 kms or six hours away. Nothing to it.

[Chronos]

Sure, satellite phones exist now, but they’re still uncommon enough that they’re no problem for thriller writers. If your plan would be foiled by a satellite phone, then you just don’t give the protagonist one, and nobody’s going to ask why they don’t have one.

[Darren_Garrison]

@Chronos

Sure, satellite phones exist now, but they’re still uncommon enough that they’re no problem for thriller writers. If your plan would be foiled by a satellite phone, then you just don’t give the protagonist one, and nobody’s going to ask why they don’t have one.

For now. But when Musk puts 50 gazillion satellites up, everyone will have global VOIP. (But there won’t be any more vampires because the sky will be ablaze with reflected sunlight.)

[Acsenray]

@Treppenwitz

Just remembered - The Man With The Golden Gun.

This quote actually isn’t quite as awful as I remembered it - Fleming may even have been sending the myth up - but it certainly is something from a different time:

j

This very line was burned into my mind too as a child. It’s so weird

[Chronos]

Should we assume that the reason M was whistling was in appreciation of an attractive woman? One who was so exceptionally attractive that even the normally non-whistling M did so by reflex?

[Acsenray]

@RealityChuck

A vital clue in Ellery Queen’s The Chinese Orange Mystery hinges on the fact that people would know something was very wrong if someone wore a suit jacket without a tie.

Okay, it’s been several days now and I haven’t stopped thinking about this. I’d love to ask Reality Chuck to indulge me by telling me all about this necktie business, spoilers be damned.

[RealityChuck]

@Acsenray

Okay, it’s been several days now and I haven’t stopped thinking about this. I’d love to ask Reality Chuck to indulge me by telling me all about this necktie business, spoilers be damned.

Just in case someone still wants to be surprised (near as I can remember it):

[spoiler]The issue was that someone was found murdered with all his clothes on backwards and everything in the room turned around.

Queen eventually figures out that the killer discovered the victim was a Catholic priest, who wore his collar backward, and that fact would reveal the murderer. So the killer switched everything around.

This was still in the era of celluloid collars, which were separate from the shirt. So why didn’t he just turn the collar around? It would be suspicious that he had no tie, leading them to realize he was a priest very quickly. Instead, everyone concentrated on asking why everything was backward.[/spoiler]